Selina Meier

Haloed as angels. Hollowed as heroes. Sacrificed as saints. Mental health care institutions continue to define “good care” mainly through patient outcomes, while quietly running on the emotional depletion of those who provide it: the healthcare workers. Healthcare workers are expected to possess bottomless wells of empathy, patience and endurance. They sustain the wellbeing of patients while being subjected to conditions that undermine their own; trapping them in a double bind of caring and being harmed by the care they provide. This thesis reads this contradiction through affect theory, arguing that mental health care functions as an affective economy in which emotional capacities circulate like a public resource constantly extracted from and rarely replenished. Using the Trieste Model of Mental Health Care as a case study, I trace how this relational and community-based alternative to the state of the art remains entangled in structures that extract, distribute and exhaust emotional labour.